The invention relates generally to a system and a method for playing fantasy sports. More particularly, the invention relates to an advanced system and method for playing fantasy sports that replicates league competition for a single user during a season of play by competing in a simulated league.
Watching teams of athletes compete in various sports is a popular pastime throughout the world. Many spectators enjoy second-guessing managers and coaches during and after a game, giving rise to the term “Monday Morning Quarterback.” Back in the 1980's, baseball fans and sports writers created the concept of a fantasy game, where the participants act as owners, managers and coaches. The participants build a team by picking real individual players through a draft, create a “dream” roster, trade, cut and recruit other players to that roster in coordination with the other participants. Participants must join a league with other participants in order to conduct these transactions in a realistic manner. Participants play against each other in pairs, and the winner is determined by taking the statistics of how the real player performed in actual play that week and tally the score based on the roster of starting players created by the participant for that week. Fantasy sports started before the Internet was widely accessed for sports statistics, so the scoring was based on simple calculations and the participants combing newspapers for the appropriate daily statistics.
Fantasy sports leagues have expanded from baseball into every professional team sport, such as football, soccer, hockey, and rugby. A modified version of the game has been developed for players to predict Supreme Court decisions. The ubiquity of computing devices and access to the Internet has allowed this form of entertainment to explode. Participants form a league and enter their picks into a website that then gathers player statistics after each real game to almost instantly calculate scores in the fantasy league, allowing the participants to track standing in their league, make trades, adjust rosters, cut players and sign players within the pool of real players in their fantasy league.
Gradek (U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0060325) discloses a method to calculate the score in fantasy sports using a live feed server and an application through the user pulling the statistics to calculate the scores. Hughes et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,603) discloses a draft for fantasy football using real players and scoring the players weekly to establish standings. Bishop (U.S. Patent Application Publication 2004/0266530) discloses a system for duals between owners of fantasy teams over a local area network (LAN) rather than through the Internet.
A fantasy sports league is just one form of online game playing available through the Internet. McMaster (U.S. Patent Application Publication 2008/0026846) describes a structured approach for multi-player on-line gaming that qualifying a player for regular play, tournaments and finals. The system includes scheduling time slots for the competition and selecting a host computer.
Mitchell et al. (U.S. Patent Application 2006/0100006) discloses an online game using points and bidding for predicting real life events that goes beyond sports competition. Similarly, Geiger (U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,900) discloses an online competition for points that are awarded for correcting predicting outcomes of sports, politics and other contests.
All of these gaming systems for fantasy sports require that a participant be part of a league with other participants in order to simulate real life competition. Additionally, since there must be at least one other participant, with some systems requiring a total of twelve participants, the league does not form until the required number is reach and sometimes leaving some people who want to participate waiting for the next season to play. Often times, a participant with superior knowledge and instincts may desire a more challenging approach than against the league that he or she is enrolled in. None of the systems presented meet this challenge to provide a gaming system that either tests and stretches the experienced player or does not require the games be played in a multi-player mode.
While these units may be suitable for the particular purpose employed, or for general use, they would not be as suitable for the purposes of the present invention as disclosed hereafter.